Free Dark Corners: A Novel by Ruth Rendell

rang the following morning, Lizzie jumped. She wasn’t going to answer it or even guess who it might be. It rang again. It will ring twice, she thought, and then they’ll give up and go away.
    The sound of a key turning in the lock brought a cold shiver. She waited in the little hallway as a man she recognised as the concierge stepped into the flat. With him was a tall, very handsome man of about her own age whom she vaguely recognised.
    ‘Who might you be?’ said the concierge.
    Lizzie did her best to make her voice bold. ‘I’m a friend of Miss Warren’s. I’m looking after the place.’
    ‘Miss Warren passed away some time ago. The apartment is now about to be occupied by this gentleman, Mr Weatherspoon.’
    Of course. That was who it was. Aunt Yvonne’s son.
    ‘Hi, Gervaise,’ said Lizzie.
    ‘Well, if it isn’t little Lizzie,’ said Gervaise Weatherspoon. ‘How did you get in?’
    ‘I’ve had a key for
years
,’ she said.
    It was plain the concierge didn’t believe her, something Lizzie resented, as for once what she said was more or less true. ‘I’ll have that key, thank you, miss, and then we’ll say no more about it,’ he said.
    She gave him the key meekly because she had just remembered she didn’t need it. The other one, the one in the floor of the recycling cupboard, was known to her and her alone. She favoured Gervaise with a radiant smile. ‘Will you be living here?’
    ‘One day,’ he said with a smile to match hers. ‘First I’ll be going on an archaeological visit to Cambodia and Laos.’
    Gervaise asked for Lizzie’s phone number so she could give him details of the flat’s phone and energy suppliers. The concierge looked disgruntled: he could help Mr Weatherspoon with that, he said. But Lizzie took no notice and wrote down her mobile number and the landline at the Kilburn flat. Gervaise’s request had given her an idea, and done her a power of good. Never mind that she was going to be an hour late for school.
    ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she promised.
     
    Lizzie packed every bag she could find in the flat. Seeing no reason to leave any of Stacey’s clothes behind, she stuffed them into suitcases from Louis Vuitton, Marks & Spencer and Selfridges. Then she phoned for a taxi.
    While she was waiting for it, there came a knock at the door. Of course she thought it was the taxi, but no, it was the concierge, with an enormous bunch of white lilies, feathery gypsophila and pink rosebuds. The card accompanying it was addressed to ‘Darling Liz’ with love from Swithin. Liz indeed. No one had ever called her that.
    Taking the flowers with her, she removed the extra key from underneath the brick in the floor of the recycling cupboard and put it in her handbag. Then she stacked the luggage on the pavement to wait for the taxi to take her to Kilburn.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    RENT DAY, THE last day of the month, had gone past. By 2 August, Carl knew he wouldn’t be paid.
    He wasn’t yet destitute. The second instalment of the advance he had received on publication of
Death’s Door
had taught him to be careful, if not frugal, and though nearly all of that had gone, he had saved a little more from the July rent that had come in. He probably had as much as four hundred pounds in his current account. But if Dermot’s August rent failed to appear – and plainly it was not going to – the demand for council tax did.
City of Westminster
it said across the top of the letter, and underneath that, the sum. He could pay it in instalments, of course, but was that much help?
    That afternoon, he sat down at the computer, went to the document called
Sacred Spirits
.doc, and read with mounting disgust what he had written. It was hopeless, useless. Tinkering with it was a waste of time. After staring at the text in despair, he deleted all ten pages. He must forget this philosophy theme, this learned stuff he was obviously useless at, and think seriously of something he could do, like a sequel